The Internet Weakens Authority

Our Product is

It's rare I bookmark an article from a magazine.

No doubt some people feel “basic” coding is beneath them. They feel they should be focusing on Java, JavaScript, UI Design, UX, etc. etc. Coding that PSD to valid, cross browser XHTML? Complete with CSS styling? Dealing with whatever browsers you want to support? Funk that, especially when we have dozens of businesses fighting to do this for us (for cheap!). Prolific competition and cheap? How can I lose! Yes, much like that extended warranty you bought, how could you lose? Very easily! Generally speaking, it seems you get what you pay for. But sometimes you have to realize that doing research is the best ROI. In the age of the internet, one man shops quickly get bought out by the competition, so that we can go very quickly from “my friend runs this” to “he sold it for more than it’s worth, and now it’s a shit service.” It happens, as I had dug up old reviews and contacted people - which I suggest you do. Never rely on sites and written reviews (they could be paid reviews and not disclosed, and some people will rant and rave after one use, and quickly change their mind after two uses!). In 2006 they were hot shit! So they still are…right? No my friend, they are not. Like I said, any time you see a review for a service, research it. Their are prolific sites that offer up reviews but I’ve noticed a lot of them allow ballot stuffing (it seems all you need is an email address to post, and those are quite easy to get). So you can see they have some heavy negative reviews followed by dozens of similar “OMG, these guys saved me, they rock so hard!” First thing you need to realize, you are outsourcing, and more than likely this work is going overseas - and generally outsourcing is a mixed bag of issues. From the services I checked out, they claimed to be “based” in the United States, but I noticed some of their class names held Russian words, another I noticed some Norwegian - and it’s most important that as I worked with some of these companies, I “figured out” how best to work with them - regardless of who they were. The Secret to Working with Third Party PSD to XHTML Services It’s simple, really:

Do not rely on their order forms to tell them everything. Do not make assumptions on what they will/won’t do.

You combat this by:

Giving them requirements if it’s not on the order form! If they offer money back guarantees and you aren’t happy - USE THEM.

Tell them exactly what you expect - if you think certain areas should have 10 pixels of padding around them (maybe you think it’s common sense) but they may not! You may have selected CSS sprites - but do you want it done a certain way? Did you want certain headings to be clickable? TELL THEM. I guess this ultimately falls down to communication skills as it often does - overcommunication is better than too little, and it’ll save you headaches in the long run! How to Deliver your PSDs No doubt, sometimes you may be working under deadlines so you may spread your work out into batches - this is a dangerous approach if you think “oh we can tweak certain fundamental aspects of our designs as we send them.” Bad, bad, bad. If you are planning batch approach, communicate this before hand so your potential partner services understands, and make sure the basics of your templates are SOLID before you send them out! I suggest having your templates done first (so you can reuse the code and maybe not need to have every PSD sent out to be done) and make sure your sidebar and navigation areas are solid (and this is where you describe how large the click areas are). Once these areas are solid, I’d make sure all future PSDs follow these pixel perfect hand-offs to insure an easy transition with the future PSDs sent off, and it’ll also save you a lot of pain. Have you used any services like this? Got any tips or tricks? Let us know! Copyright © 2008 iKeif - tech and social media geek, mootools fan, and a ton of links. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@ikeif.net so we can take legal action immediately.Plugin by Taragana

As a web developer, you’re constantly approached with pulling off zany schemes. In the words of Ian Malcolm: Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. Replace “scientists” with “designers” and you see the dilemma. They know you can pull off some funky effects in flash, so they opt to flash. However, flash is still not quite as easilly accessible and searchable that we all would like - and please, you can try to argue this point, but the majority of flash efforts I’ve seen tend to bypass the accessibility and searchability because it’s just easier to do the cool animations/sounds/effects/transparencies in flash (or flex) than it is to do in javascript. Internet Explorer be damned! The unholy bastion of a front-end developers existence tends to fall on IE6 - which is at 24% and dropping in its market share. This is always the what I end up falling on when talking to a fellow developer, and it usually goes like this: Me: We could totally pull off that flash effect! We can do multiple animations using mootools, and it’d be indexable and still be applicable without javascript if we code it right! Him: You mean those large transparent PNG images that would be sliding into place? Me: Right! We could..totally… pull it off… in everything except IE6…. Him: … Me: …shit. I mean, this isn’t too far from the truth, but the point is - accounting for IE6 is a bitch. I recently had to redo someone else’s code that used a PNG script I had rewrote because the alphapng filter was hitting multiple images on the page (dozens of images had a filter alpha opacity of 1). A quick audit of the code and reorganizing the javascript (ahhh… another blog post for the future, me thinks?) and suddenly IE6 was back in action, faster than ever!….not really, but it was at least usable. So you see a lot of our ideas rely on javascript being utilized - or flash, which still will rely on javascript to be embedded - again, because of IE and other cross-browser issues - so we need to keep in mind that hankering feeling… What if they don’t have javascript? No doubt, some people with disabilities may still be able to use a site that utilizes javascript. It’s possible that they may have some ability to use a browser, but if they don’t turn off javascript, it may make it a more difficult browsing experience. Don’t forget, there are a plethora of mobile browsers that may/may not do javascript well, if at all. This falls into a certain realm of uncertainty - and as I ran through a gamut of big e-tailers sites (American Eagle, Anthropologie, L.L. Bean, amongst others) L.L. Bean was the only one that I could purchase from (well, reach a point where they ask for payment). The inherent problem of this, they rely on AJAX calls to do their server side form validation - so it’s possible that if you don’t have javascript, you could still enter bad data and find out your Christmas order is incorrect, maybe too late when they call to tell you why your credit card was declined, or that it was sent to a non-existant address. Understandably - from a SEO perspective, they only need to index up to the product pages. If they’re smart, they don’t have any “highly relevant, high-traffic” content in their shopping cart pages or payment pages (it seems that those are generic, so it should be moot). The dilemma occurs in how they handle that percentage that is browsing without javascript. Maybe it’s a small percentage. Maybe it’s corporate users, or users from the large assortment of mobile devices. The point is - why should you neglect a sale just because they’re on webTV? Enter the Dragon <noscript> PPK on quirksmode wrote about the use of <noscript> and it’s use in helping point out (to the majority of browsers) that we can throw a little message stating that “hey - you need javascript.” I’ve looked at L.L. Bean’s source code, and they’re littered with <noscript>. But really, this shouldn’t be a concern as… You shouldn’t be catering to a rich experience. Really. You should be presenting a website that works - period. I should be able to hit it in lynx. In Safari. My iPhone. His blackberry. IE6. IE5. We shouldn’t be relying on javascript to pull off effects and basic, fundamental functionality. Javascript is an enhancement, not a requirement. If it’s required, you’ve failed. I’m not saying I’ve got all the answers - but I do know that if we want to code in a way that no matter what crap happens in the near future, we need to focus on the basics and get them executed as cleanly, and simply as possible. There may be a point that we finally say - okay, you’ll need javascript to get these cool “up to the minute” updates, live editing, in place context editing, etc. But that’s really at a point when you have to decide - who is this website for? Who am I catering to? Why do I care if the degraded expeience means things pop instead of fade in? More than likely, this same day will be when you say… Shit, a fraction of a percent of people visit my site on IE6. I might want to tell them to upgrade. Copyright © 2008 iKeif - tech and social media geek, mootools fan, and a ton of links. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@ikeif.net so we can take legal action immediately.Plugin by Taragana

So Mark @ Mashable wrote about YouTube updating their community guidelines against Hate speech. He points out the obvious - people on the internet are retarded and this change means they are censoring us all, and we are fucked because all censorship is evil, and they have won because they can’t say their evil words online. Freedom of speech is absolute. If we can’t beat them without silencing their message, we obviously aren’t being convincing enough to those they are converting. Fight them with our own free speech and expression.

Overall - it’s a good read. YouTube doing a political nod (gee, just like Google did for China, and then did with Law Enforcement Agencies). My only real issue with the article is the wrap-up: We Need to be Smart About This As Uncle Ben used to say, with great power comes great responsibility… If we want to keep it safe from the grubby paws of governmental intervention, companies like Google must implement and enforce standards of policing the community.  Otherwise, the government will do that for us, and I think I speak for all of us when I say we do not want that.

Google isn’t the little shop down the street. They’re a huge-ass corporation. If MSN was doing this people would be calling for Bill Gates head. If Steve Jobs did it, people would make shiny new logos promoting how innovative and forward thinking he’s being. Instead, YouTube (which was purchased by Google) is taking it into their own hands. This shows the error of their “Do No Evil” slogan - nothing is really black and white. They can do something that a lot of people can consider evil - collecting user data, censoring hate speech, censoring anti-hate speech. I do not welcome our new Internet Overlords. Benjamin Franklin once said, They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

We continue to do so, and turn a blind eye to it. We say it’s for the best. It’s better this way. Think of the children. To me, this just shows how freaking worthless our rights are becoming. Services talk about how they’re for everything, but what’s going to happen in the future? For a citizen to express their discontentment, they’ll have to make a video, encrypt it, send it to a friend over seas to upload it to a “video sharing site” hosted on a derilect oil tanker in international waters that’s under siege by the U.S. Government for posting a video of someone saying “The Bill of Rights is an illusion.” So what - how did I get all of this off a little YouTube censorship? Because Google was supposed to be that Little Big company. They’re supposed to be those guys that got big being good, making Microsoft look foolish for ever putting DRM on your computer. Instead they’re slowly transforming into “will this be good for the company?” type double-speak they can throw around in marketing and PR to make themselves look good. How long until Google starts telling you what to write on your blog? “You said not nice things about Google, so we’re giving you a PR of 1, unless you delete those articles. By the way, we bought the rights to your domain, so when it expires, it’s ours unless you comply.” Those who have the power, make the rules. Those that get the information can make their power. I know, I know, a bit paranoidal-freakish, but hey, political season stupidity always riles me up. Copyright © 2008 iKeif - tech and social media geek, mootools fan, and a ton of links. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@ikeif.net so we can take legal action immediately.Plugin by Taragana